When Big Thief first started making waves in the indie music scene with its 2016 debut album Masterpiece, I was still listening to some truly terrible music. AJR, Imagine Dragons and Lukas Graham (no, I don’t want to talk about it) dominated my Spotify account, but that didn’t stop me from immediately falling in love with “Paul” the first time my friend played it for me on her guitar one quarantine night. What I found when I got home was an incredibly impressive folk-rock discography, both from the band and from the members’ solo careers.
Since its emergence nearly a decade ago, the quartet has released five more albums as a group and 11 solo albums. As with many musicians nowadays, the band owes much of its exposure to social media platforms like TikTok. Characteristically heartbreaking singles like “anything” or “not a lot, just forever” off Adrianne Lenker’s solo album songs and the band’s recent single “Vampire Empire” have gained traction online and led to a gradual but significant increase in Big Thief’s popularity. Moreover, its previous album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, garnered nearly universal positive reception among both audiences and critics upon its release, which brought a bold approach to whimsical, introspective folk rock.
That is very much not to say that Big Thief was guaranteed to release another masterpiece this time around: 2024 saw the departure of founding bassist Max Oleartchick for “interpersonal reasons,” and many fans were rightfully worried that Big Thief would be missing a crucial part of its complex, Americana-ridden musical style.
Oleartchick’s absence from the album is not, in any sense of the word, hidden. He pervades the album’s glossy, high-production studio sound — a stark contrast to the more stripped-back and intimate feel of Big Thief’s previous works. In fact, it is in the process of “dating” after the “divorce” that the now-trio found itself working with the litany of session musicians and ambient veterans that pop up across Double Infinity.
With so many new faces and such a spontaneous recording process, it is no wonder that the album deals very heavily with the dichotomy between the past and the future, or as Lenker puts it, “what’s been lost and what lies waiting.” The eponymous duality that Lenker and company fixates on here sees people less as the central actors of humanist free will and more as simply spectators of a large, beautifully unbothered universe: vessels of an energy that has been around for much longer than we have and will continue to ebb and flow long after we are buried.
Although it may seem odd to, in a single breath, make conclusions about both the deeply personal and the vastly cosmic, this is exactly what Big Thief achieves at the outset of its album, with a stardust-like chime introduction and a reverb-soaked guitar welcoming listeners into its little corner of space-time. While the vocal effects make her sound like an otherworldly angel, Lenker instead chooses to reflect on her very human and very mortal experience of aging and time. She grapples here with her own place among her memories and struggles to place herself anywhere firmly “next to eternity,” eventually landing on a subtle plea: “Let me be / Incomprehensible.”
This incomprehensibility — the indescribable, infinite human experience that we harbor in each of our souls — is what carries Big Thief throughout the rest of the album. From its zestful frustration at the incompleteness of language in “Words” to its unapologetic embrace of primal, sexual desires on “All Night All Day,” Double Infinity is a work characterized by a visceral type of awe, one unmitigated by the depths of human despair. In fact, despite Lenker’s well-deserved reputation for soul-crushing songwriting, the songs here do not hold the same depressive melancholies found in songs like “Real House” or “Paul.”
Yes, they are still sad, but it is a vivid sadness. Each song is filled with exploding colors of psychedelic human experience that infect every cell in your body and turn you into little more than an awestruck child. This sensation is at its most potent on songs like “Los Angeles” and “Grandmother,” where Lenker’s feelings of mystic sadness are exhaled into with the breath of life and all of its swirling emotions. It is an indescribable feeling — like staring out the window of an airplane “crossing the Grand Canyon” and being swallowed by the majesty of the Earth and time and the cosmos.
Although Big Thief manages to maintain this wonder for the bulk of the album, that is not to say it is faultless on this LP. Songs like “No Fear” and “Happy with You” serve an undeniable atmospheric purpose, but their chant-like, repetitive structures often feel like they drag on for a little bit too long. Doubtlessly, Lenker is not mindlessly shying away from songwriting here. If she wanted to, she could write a verse that would kill me — of that, I’m sure — but that doesn’t mean I’m not left wanting more from these songs.
The album feels something like a Herculean triumph in the face of life, and the album’s closer, “How Could I Have Known” is thus a fitting come-down from the interstellar journey that is the rest of the album. The group vocals and driving, heartbeat percussion ends the album off on the sound of a well-deserved, oceanside pink sunset: coming back home to your dog and melting into the smell of your torn-up couch.
After letting the album live with me for a week, I can say that I think about that lime on the album cover a lot. I think about what it’s like to eat sour things and miss my friends, and I remember how, when I received my first few Hopkins emails about the traditions of the city I would call my home for four years, all I could think about was how weird lemon sticks looked. I think about what it is to experience life.
Is Double Infinity Big Thief’s magnum opus? No, not by a long shot. If I could, would I make it mandatory listening for all of my friends? Yeah — I wouldn’t even have to think about it. We all deserve to experience humanity, don’t we?
Big Thief will be in D.C. performing on its Somersault 360 Tour on Oct. 24, 2025. It is a transformative, out-of-body experience to watch live.
